Ben Stein, actor and, uh — I almost said comedian, but he’s not that funny — former host of “Win Ben Stein’s Money” and former speechwriter for President Nixon, is turning out to be a serious nutcase.
And I don’t mean “lovable nutcase,” like dear old Aunt Clara from Bewitched who collected doorknobs. I mean malignant, nasty SOB nutcase, an enemy, in his own way, to core American values.
I know whenever you hear “American values” you automatically think of family-related stuff, like raising your kids right and staying married to the same woman (or man). Saying the Pledge and honoring the soldiers, eating watermelon at the county fair.
But science is a core American value too, one that stretches back to before the founding of the nation. Ben Franklin is known as a scientist, for instance. Thomas Jefferson is less known as an experimentalist but was no less a rigorous rationalist and scientific thinker. Wilbur and Orville Wright are quintessential American heroes.
And damn, I hope I don’t have to go into detail for everybody reading this to know that some very large part of our American progress, power and economic growth is a direct result of leadership in scientific education, research and funding.
Science is not something every one of us can DO, but it’s something every American, traditionally, has supported. Sure, there might have been those curmudgeonly few who turned away grumbling when men landed on the Moon, but for the rest of us, that moment was riveting.
I went to watch the Space Shuttle land at Edwards Air Force Base in California in 1981, along with about a quarter of a million other people, and the feeling rippling through that crowd was PRIDE. Pride that humans had done this, but more than that, pride that Americans had done it. There might have been a hundred thousand Japanese cameras in that crowd, but the flags in evidence — no small number of them — were all American.
After a February visit to Washington, DC, I wrote in an earlier post:
Ten seconds in the door and I’m over by the Apollo 11 Command Module, lines of moisture running down my face. I stand there looking at it, touching the transparent case it rests in, for a good ten minutes.
I’m overcome by just how magnificent an accomplishment this thing represents. In an era when Washington seems a fount of lies and stupidity, this was something done by MY people, the people of learning and reason and courage. Men sat in this thing, and traveled to the Moon! And came back alive!
Maybe I can’t match the feat, but I can recognize the magnitude of it. In my atheist heart, I reserve reverence for true achievement.
This, the real thing, kindles bright sparks inside me, and sets off tears.
So here’s Ben Stein, talking to Christianity Today:
Scientists were the people in Germany telling Hitler that it was a good idea to kill all the Jews. Scientists were telling Stalin it was a good idea to wipe out the middle-class peasants. Scientists were telling Mao Tse-Tung it was fine to kill 50 million people in order to further the revolution.
Scientists = murderous, genocidal elitist maniacs. Got it, Ben.
Jeez.
Funny how it looks from my side the equation. It looks to ME like Ben Stein, who made a trip to Dachau to underscore the lesson that science causes death and horror, is more of a threat to American values, HUMAN values, than anything science could manage.
………………..
Just a side thought: Retroactively in the light of George W. Bush, Nixon looks like a nice man, and a bright, competent one. Yet decades later, to see the anti-intellectual strain that runs like poison through the veins and brains of the conservative Republican movement, now very much present in Ben Stein, Nixon’s former speechwriter, I wonder.
I’d unconsciously assumed that the modern anti-intellectual, anti-science club was something recent, from just the last 10 or 15 years. But then I remember the shootings (murders) of Kent State students by National Guardsmen, and Nixon’s antipathy to student protestors that came out in the smug, hateful speeches of Vice President Spiro Agnew, and I wonder if it didn’t all really start with Nixon.
Did anti-student become anti-college, anti-college become anti-education, anti-education become anti-science? Certainly, to me, anti-science is anti-America.
Whatever.
It does seem to me, though, that when you deny the fruits of the mind — reason and science and art and even compassion — you’ve destroyed yourself as a people.
And here we are in the U.S., down in a political pit, and heading into an even deeper economic one. Will history show this moment, the moment of Ben Stein’s “Expelled,” as the triumph of the know-nothings, the twilight of the American experiment? I wonder.